Today NASA released a photo taken by the 20-year-old Hubble Space Telescope of a 13.7 billion-year-old galaxy whose light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach us. That’s the most distant object anyone has ever seen.
In the image, the far-off universe looks like a mere dot and NASA reports that it would take more than 100 of those mini-galaxies to make up one similar to our own.
“We’re peering into an era where big changes are afoot,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. “The rapid rate at which the star birth is changing tells us if we go a little further back in time we’re going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form.”
Photo courtesy of NASA.